Quotes About Culture

As educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, jocks, and valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functioning illiterates [...]. English itself will steadily decay unless we get back to basics and start to respect our language again.

Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: "progress" unguided by humanism is not progress.

Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal.

A medida que los países se vuelven más inteligentes, se alejan de Dios.

The view that humans are passive receptacles of stereotypes, words, and images is condescending to ordinary people and gives unearned importance to the pretensions of cultural and academic elites.

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They're called women.

Quem tem familiaridade com a vida acadêmica sabe que ela gera cultos ideológicos propensos ao dogma e resistentes à crítica.

Man has no nature; what he has is history.

The enmeshing of polysemy with grammar is also visible in one of the ways that Americans and Britons are divided by their common language. When a product gives its name to an employer, the name is singular in the United States (The Globe is expanding its comics section) but plural in the United Kingdom (The Guardian are giving you the chance to win books).

This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.

Among Western democracies, the United States leaps out of the homicide statistics. Instead of clustering with kindred peoples like Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany, it hangs out with toughs like Albania and Uruguay, close to the median rate for the entire world.

Steven Pinker

This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance. DECIVILIZATION

Una civilización optimista está abierta a la innovación y no la teme, y se basa en las tradiciones de la crítica.

The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child's infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

raped, or killed, and it's hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning

Far from sprouting from the grass roots or channeling the anger of know-nothings, the disdain for reason, science, humanism, and progress has a long pedigree in elite intellectual and artistic culture.

half of American eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver's license.

The idea that the language people speak controls how they think—linguistic determinism—is a recurring theme in intellectual life.

According to Linguistic Determinism, the language we speak is the language of thought, or at least structures it in major ways.

The question is whether language determines thought—whether the language we speak makes it difficult or impossible to think certain thoughts, or alters the way we think in surprising or consequential ways.

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

the dozens of Eskimo words for snow.

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.